The Final Crumpet (8 page)

Stuart set down his mug and reached for a large yellow pad. “Now…in the few minutes we have before you go off to your respective interviews, I would like to review the answers you gave this morning.” His mouth squeezed into a simper. “If at all possible, try to give similar answers to the BBC.”

Flick saw Nigel roll his eyes again. She found it hard not to snicker at Stuart’s pomposity.

“The questioning began,” Stuart said, “when David Hadley of the
Kent and Sussex Courier
asked how finding the body in the garden will impact the museum. Nigel, you gave an acceptable variation of the politically correct answer we practiced at the rehearsal.

“Immediately thereafter, Brendan Baker of KM Radio asked how the museum manages to grow tea in the Kentish climate. Nigel chose to answer the question himself—and, I must admit, did an adequate job explaining the tea garden’s heating system.”

“Why, thank you, Stuart,” Nigel said. “Your consistently faint praise is overwhelming.”

“It’s no more than you deserve, Nigel,” Stuart turned to the next page. “At this point, there were several rather silly questions about why the museum went to the trouble of building a tea garden and what the garden accomplishes. Flick disposed of them elegantly.”

“I did my best.” She fluttered her eyelashes at Nigel. He stared heavenward and produced a barely audible groan.

Stuart pressed on: “The next significant question came from Janice Henderson of the
Sevenoaks Chronicle.
She asked for a description of the sequence of events that led to the discovery of the body in the tea garden. Nigel provided a straightforward chronology, beginning with the museum’s decision to replace the two stunted Assam tea bushes.”

“Do you think of ‘straightforward’ as a compliment?” Nigel asked.

Flick felt surprised that Stuart didn’t take the bait. Instead, he said, “Moving right along…we received several surprising questions about whether or not Etienne Makepeace had an unrevealed relationship with the museum. For reasons that escape me, a few reporters seem to have concluded that Makepeace and the museum were joined at the hip during the early 1960s. You both fielded these questions quite well, describing Makepeace as nothing more than a noted tea expert who occasionally lectured at the museum.”

Nigel gave a grudging nod, acknowledging Stuart’s fainter praise. Stuart turned the page.

“Gillian Nash of the
Edenbridge News
asked another question we had anticipated: ‘Have the authorities provided any information as to why Etienne Makepeace was buried in your tea garden?’ Nigel echoed the acceptable response that he gave at the rehearsal. Unfortunately, Ms. Nash decided to press forward and ask the question again in a slightly different form. Specifically, ‘Do you have any idea why a noted tea expert was murdered at the museum and buried in your tea garden?’ ”

“I know what you’re going to say,” Nigel said. “I became flustered; I hemmed and hawed.”

“A perfectly natural response under the circumstances. What matters is that you recovered quickly and professionally. I especially liked the way you invited Ms. Nash to check with the police and report back to you if they provided an answer.”

Flick ventured a glance Nigel’s way. He was beaming at Stuart, all past slights forgiven.

“Finally,” Stuart said, “David Hadley came back with an interesting follow-up question: ‘Have you thought of creating an exhibit about Etienne Makepeace?’ ”

“I really liked my answer to that one,” Nigel said, clearly expecting Stuart to concur.

Stuart, however, frowned at his yellow pad. “You responded in a way that cut off further discussion—I would have preferred a more flexible answer, and…”

Nigel didn’t give Stuart an opportunity to finish. “The question didn’t invite a wishy-washy answer. I explained that the mission of the Royal Tunbridge Wells Tea Museum is to offer exhibits that illuminate the history of tea. Consequently, because there’s no connection between Mr. Makepeace’s disappearance and the history of tea, the museum has no earthly reason to create an Etienne Makepeace exhibit.”

“Nevertheless,” Stuart said, “I would have preferred a less authoritarian answer—an answer delivered by the museum’s curator, who, after all, is the executive responsible for creating new exhibits.”

Flick saw Nigel peer guiltily at her; she replied with a friendly wink. She remembered feeling relieved when Nigel decided to field the question by himself. It took time and deliberation to make decisions about new exhibits. Anything she said would have been a shoot-from-the-hip answer. Nigel’s forceful response proved the point—although it did come across as a bit “authoritarian,”

Even so, he risked taking a shot and deserves your support.

“I thought about chiming in,” she said. “I was going to add, I can’t imagine why we’d want an exhibit on Etienne Makepeace, but then Earl began to squawk.”

“Three cheers for the blessed bird.” Stuart set his yellow pad next to his feet. “He interrupted at precisely the moment the media ran out of sensible questions. I may invite him to every news conference I organize.”

Nigel turned to Flick “Did you have any idea what the avian ruckus was all about?”

She shook her head. “That loud clucking sound Earl kept making is brand-new to me. I don’t know anything about parrots—or their vocalizations.”

“Whatever he was trying to say, the reporters seemed fascinated,” Nigel said. “They lifted his tablecloth and forgot about the two of us.”

“Earl was probably chirping, ‘take my picture,’ ” Stuart said. “I think your bird craves attention. He seemed to be posing when the photographers cranked up their cameras. He looked like he enjoyed all those flash units going off in his face—at least until Cha-Cha arrived on the scene. That dog is a bigger show-off than the parrot.”

“I wish our pets could do the BBC interview you scheduled for me.” Flick emptied her mug. “I have just enough time to get myself another cuppa and run a comb through my hair before the arrival of…” She felt herself frowning at Stuart. “Did you tell me the reporter’s name?”

Stuart frowned back. “Now that you mention it, I don’t know it.”

Thirty minutes later, Flick welcomed Harry Simpson, the BBC interviewer, a tall, slightly stooped, ruddy-faced man in his late twenties. He had a thick crop of dark hair and piercing, intelligent eyes. Harry, in turn, introduced Paco, a short, swarthy cameraman who seemed barely out of his teens. Flick never learned Paco’s last name.

“We haven’t done a full-blown feature on the museum in decades,” Harry said, as he looked around the lobby, “so everything in the place will be new to our viewers. Paco and I decided that the best way to organize our interview today is around a five-quid tour of the facility. Whenever we reach a photogenic locale, I’ll ask you an appropriate question or two on-camera. Back at the studio, we’ll edit the various snippets together to create an intelligible story. What do you think?”

“I love it!” Flick said. “Just promise me that you will discard all footage of my knees shaking or my voice quivering.”

Harry offered his hand along with a dazzling, professional smile. “We have a deal.”

Paco slung several battery packs around his neck and hefted a large digicam to his shoulder. He flipped a switch; a surprisingly small flood lamp atop the TV camera projected a beam of light that made Flick blink. “We passed a gift shop when we came in,” he said. “Why don’t we begin there?”

Paco wanted to photograph Flick in front of the display of tea-drinking teddy bears, while Harry’s preferred backdrop was the bookcase full of tea-related novels, cookbooks, and music CDs to play during afternoon tea. Flick talked them into using the shelves that held more than two hundred kinds of loose and bagged teas produced around the world. Harry asked Flick to describe her favorite items on-sale in the shop.

“We sell all of the things our visitors need to brew and serve a perfect cuppa,” she said. “Teapots, tea filters, teacups, teaspoons, tea mugs, teakettles, tea cozies—the list goes on and on. But I’m most proud of our selection of teas grown on five continents. Our visitors can take home some of the rarest teas in the world and also some of the most unusual.”

“That looked perfect through the camera,” Paco said. “Ditto from my perspective,” Harry said. “Where’s the nervousness you promised us?”

Flick pointed to her throat. “Right here—waiting to come out if you ask me a question that I can’t answer.”

Paco turned to Harry. “She’s confused us with a real investigative reporting team. Why not tell her the truth—that we never ask tough questions?”

“Well—
hardly
ever,” Harry said to Flick, finishing with a big grin.

“We’ll start at the rear of the ground floor, with the Duchess of Bedford Tearoom,” Flick said.

“I trust the food is good,” Paco said hopefully.

“I’m sure that we can get you a scone or two to munch on—in the spirit of assisting editorial research.”

“I knew I was going to love this assignment.”

The next hour sped by for Flick. She escorted the two BBC visitors around the museum and spoke briefly for the camera at each location.

The Tea Garden:

“Yes, the walled-in patch of land beyond the tearoom is our tea garden. I wish that I could take you out there, but the police have asked us to keep the access doors locked.”

And:
“The garden is heated by subterranean hot-water pipes. On a sunny winter day, it can feel almost tropical.”

And:
“You’ll have to ask the police whether or not our tea garden is the scene of the crime. All I can tell you is that we found Etienne Makepeace’s body buried in the garden.”

The World of Tea Map Room:

“The large floor-to-ceiling maps show the major tea-growing regions of the world—which are mostly in Asia. The smaller panels depict the journey tea takes from Asia to our grocery stores.”

And:
“Most of the antique maps on display came from the collection of Commodore Desmond Hawker—one of the great nineteenth-century tea merchants, a man who built a huge fortune importing tea to Great Britain. As you may know, the museum has undertaken to purchase the collection from the Hawker estate, following the recent death of Dame Elspeth Hawker.”

The Commodore Hawker Room:

“Commodore Hawker used much of his personal fortune to establish the Hawker Foundation early in the twentieth century. The Foundation subsequently established the Royal Tunbridge Wells Tea Museum to celebrate the importance of tea in Great Britain, to honor the commodore’s memory, and to house the family’s many tea-related antiquities. The Commodore Hawker Room is an accurate reproduction of Desmond’s business office—down to the antique fountain pens that he purchased around 1890.”

The History of Tea Colonnade:

“This is the museum’s most popular gallery. Visitors love the large diorama that recounts tea’s long and fascinating history. Legend says that tea was first brewed as a drink nearly five thousand years ago in China. Whether or not that’s true, it’s indisputable that tea played a critical role in Europe’s and Britain’s-economic history.”

Flick watched patiently while Paco took several close-up shots of the antiquities on display in the colonnade. He seemed especially interested in the collection of formal invitations to afternoon teas issued by England’s royal family during the early twentieth century. When Paco finished, she said, “Let’s move to the exhibits on our second floor…” Flick quickly corrected herself: “I mean one flight up, on our
first
floor.”

When are you going to stop making that silly mistake?

Flick knew, but often managed to forget, that the Brits called the bottom floor of the building the “ground floor” rather than the “first floor”—a major change to the numbering scheme she had used all her life. The pattern continued: the “first floor” in England was equivalent to what Americans labeled the “second floor” —and so on, to the top of the building.

Harry Simpson smiled at her. “Another example of two peoples separated by a common language.”

Flick ushered them one flight up the main staircase, where her running commentary continued.

The Tea at Sea Gallery:

“You have a good eye—that
is
a replica of the famous Indiaman,
Repulse,
which belonged to the East India Company. The Hawker Ship Model Collection includes many well-known ships involved in the tea trade.”

And:
“I agree—the tea clippers are among the most beautiful sailing ships ever launched. They were built long and narrow with lots of sail, in the pattern of the eighteenth-century Baltimore clippers that were noted for their speed. According to sea lore, this class of ship earned the name ‘clipper’ because of how fast they clipped along.”

The Hawker Tea Antiquities Collection:

“I have to admit that this is my favorite gallery. The Hawker Tea Antiquities Collection includes thousands of fascinating items, including all manner of teacups, teapots, and teakettles…a king’s ransom of gold and silver tea services…an impressive array of samovars…tea ceremony sets from Asia…and, my favorite among favorites, several rare pieces of locally made, wooden Tunbridge Ware, including a famous set of mosaic-covered tea caddies called ‘All the Teas in China.’ ”